William F. Garrity

In The New York Times, someone, thankfully, speaks in counter to people who whine about email. 

October 25, 2009

Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out

By BEN YAGODA

THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
By John Freeman
Illustrated. 244 pp. Scribner. $25

On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-­five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine ­business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest were mass mailings or "cc’s," including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven "Google alerts" on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters. I had been getting this odd Cyrillic e-mail for some time, and 25 of my incoming messages on this particular day were responses to a query I had sent to my colleagues asking if Russians had been spamming them, too.

By John Freeman’s lights, that makes me a bad guy. In The Tyranny of E-Mail, he writes that "one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion." And the problem is? In this case I asked a question and got helpful responses. Freeman says what I should have done is "pick up the phone." Really? Take the time to make 50 separate calls, intruding on people who aren’t interested in this issue? (Scan and delete an e-mail message: three seconds at most, at a time of one’s choice. Conduct a telephone call with me: 30 seconds, minimum, at a time of my choice, resulting in major interruption.)

The case of the Russian spam illustrates a problem with this book. In his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side, Freeman, the editor of Granta, ignores its good and useful features.

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